"How is it," said she thoughtfully, and looking away from him, "that men
leave out their sisters when they sum up womankind? Are not we women too?
My poor brother quite forgets he has one woman who will never, never
desert nor deceive him; dear, darling fellow!" and with these three last
words she rose and kissed the tips of her fingers, and waved the kiss to
Vizard with that free magnitude of gesture which belonged to antiquity:
it struck the Anglo-Saxon flirt at her feet with amazement. Not having
good enough under his skin to sympathize with that pious impulse, he
first stagnated a little while; and then, not to be silent altogether,
made his little, stale, commonplace comment on what she had told him.
"Why, it is like a novel."

"A very unromantic one," replied Zoe.

"I don't know that. I have read very interesting novels with fewer new
characters than this: there's a dark beauty, and a fair, and a duenna
with an eagle eye and an aquiline nose."

"Hush!" said Zoe: "that is her room;" and pointed to a chamber door that
opened into the apartment.

Oh, marvelous female instinct! The duenna in charge was at that moment
behind that very door, and her eye and her ear at the key-hole, turn
about.

Severne continued his remarks, but in a lower voice.

"Then there's a woman-hater and a man-hater: good for dialogue."